Back on March 5, 2001, long before the terms therapeutic cloning and
reproductive cloning were in popular use, we defined these terms and
wrote that the scientific community should create a moratorium on all attempts
to clone humans for at least five years or until we had additional time to gain
some much-needed experience with animal cloning that could give us an
indication of where our technology might take us and have a reasoned debate
about what we really wanted to do once we achieve this capability.After the five years were up, the ban should
not be permanent but renewable in one-year increments if sufficient progress
has not been made.We still believe
that without such a voluntary ban, the scientific community riskslosing control of their freedom to pursue
research without the meddling of religious fundamentalists and their legal
minions.

Although we are
generally pronatalist with regard to the use of advanced technology for
assisted reproduction for infertile couples -- such as In Vitro Fertilization
(IVF), for example -- we wish to go on record as categorically opposing the use
of human reproductive cloning for any purpose at this time – on the
grounds that this technology is radically premature and inevitable early
failures could well set the entire field back many years.

Even after five years
of serious animal experimentation following the historic cloning of Dolly the
sheep by Dr. Ian Wilmut in Edinburgh with subsequent successes in pigs, cows,
goats, mice, rats, cats, rabbits [458,459], monkeys, and other exotic species
like the gaur (but conspicuously not with dogs or horses, despite intense
efforts), at the present time the overall failure rate is still excessive
(greater than 98 percent failure, even in the hands of teams of expert
veterinarians and infertility specialists). Embryos never implant (no
pregnancy), lead to spontaneous abortions (still births after implantation), or
sudden death soon-after-birth (because of unexplained congenital anomalies). In
short, if the truth be told -- "our technique is primitive, and we're
guessing most of the time."

Therefore,
we must concur with Drs. Ian Wilmut, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cloning,
and Michael West, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, MA, that it is
"criminally irresponsible" for gynecologists or others motivated by
publicity to experiment with human embryos for the purpose of satisfying the
real needs of prospective parents, gay couples, or other self-indulgent, but
wealthy individuals [35]. Respectable scientists must disassociate themselves
from those who have gone on record as seeking to accomplish this feat secretly
in the near term, such as: (1) Dr. Richard Seed, Ph.D. of Chicago; (2) Dr.
Brigitte Boisselier, Ph.D., Biochemist, former Visiting Professor of Chemistry
at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Scientific Director of Clonaid, Inc. in The
BAHAMAS; and Bishop of the Raelian Movement of Geneva, SWITZERLAND and
Quebec, CANADA; and (3) Drs. Panos (Panayiotis) Zavos, Ph.D. Andrologist,
Andrology Institute and former Professor in the Department of Animal Sciences,
the University of Kentucky in Lexington with Dr. Sverino Antinori, M,D,,
OB/GYN, Infertility Pioneer and Director of the International Associated
Research Institute, Rome, ITALY; both of whom are otherwise respected
infertility specialists. We believe that our profound biological ignorance will
not be magically erased in the course of a few months by intense animal
experimentation, and the inevitable failures of human reproductive cloning,
which, when publicly leaked to the media for the first time, can only cause
harmful long-term consequences for the progress of medical research. Instead,
it is proposed that we should revisit this emotionally-charged issue in another
five years, given the high stakes, until such time as our technique improves
substantially and a heavy-handed legislative reaction will be less likely.An influential group of religious
conservatives has already captured the heart and mind of the President on this
subject, as became abundantly clear in his 15-minute address to the nation on
Wednesday, April 10, 2002 [475]

On the other hand, we
should hasten to point out that human therapeutic cloning for the purpose
of harvesting embryonic stem cells is an acceptable approach to attempting to
cure diseases in human adults, and the immediate prospects for this particular
technology appear to be quite promising. Prof. Douglas Melton, a developmental
biologist at Harvard University, was one of the first to publish a scientific
study of the potential of embryonic stem cells. In work published in October
2000, he showed that such pluripotent cells could be turned into a wide variety
of cell types (muscle, nerve, and skin). Other scientists who have begun
working with these cells describe growing beating heart cells in culture; still
others are working to generate bone marrow for treating victims of leukemia and
other cancers [451, 452]. Please let's not "throw out the baby with the
bath water," as Jeremy Rifkin [453] might have us do when he stated
sarcastically in a recent Op-Ed Piece, "Customized human cloning even
offers the specter of a new kind of immortality." [454]

Reference
[455] reviews the recent chaotic meeting held in Rome, hosted by Drs. Severino
Antinori, Panos Zavos, and Avi Ben-Abraham. Despite the controversy engendered
by the meeting, Antinori revealed that they would hold a second meeting in
Monte Carlo, MONACO in October 2001 to fine-tune their plan to accomplish their
goals within two years. He recently claimed to have spent more than $100,000
from anonymous private sources (presumably from wealthy Asian and Arabian men)
to set up a lab with 20 researchers of various nationalities in a secret Asian
location with the aim of cloning the first human baby.How far has he gotten? He states, "We
have cloned a human embryo up to 20 cells" (recall that Advanced Cell
Technology, Inc. had ostensibly accomplished an embryo of only six cells before
the cells stopped dividing [269]). Antinori's approach will be "to utilize
the nuclei from epidermal cells instead of from fibroblasts and also by using
oocytes at different stages of the cell cycle." [460] Dr. Antinori has
just now claimed that he has successfully implanted one such embryo in a
surrogate mother enrolled in his program who is now "eight weeks pregnant."
This quote was first reported in Gulf News, an English-language
newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, on April 3, 2002, while Antinori was in
the process of responding to a question during a lecture he was giving at the ZayyedCenter forFollow-up and Coordination, a think
tank in Abu Dhabi. [471] Also, the partnership between Antinori and Zavos
mentioned above appears to have been mutually terminated as of last Fall, but
this was not announced publically until just last week [444].

In
summary, the above proposal for a five-year moratorium on human cloning is
consistent with similar recommendations made by a number of organizations,
including the National Academy of Sciences [20, 35, 126, 247, 248, 249, 250],
the State of California [371], 112 ACE University Presidents [11], the American
Association for the Advancement of Science [416], A letter to Congress signed
by 40 Nobel Prize Winners [475], and various foreign governments, including
Canada [529], Britain [140, 165, 425, 426, 427], Australia [449], Germany [395,
396], Sweden [310], and Japan[118].However, we hasten to add
that we do not favor any legislation that would criminalizes scientific investigation
into therapeutic cloning, as we believe that this would set a truly negative
precedent and impede medical progress toward "some of the most
debilitating diseases known to man."By declaring scientifically-valuable biomedical research illegal,
currently-proposed legislation to permanently ban all forms of cloning, if it
were ever passed in the Senate and signed by the President, which he has
suggested he would do, "would have a chilling effect on all scientific
research in the United States. Such legal restrictions on scientific
investigation would send a strong signal to the next generation of researchers
that unfettered and responsible scientific investigation is not welcome in this
country." [475]

B.
Proposed Moratorium on Human Cross-Species Cloning for a Period of Five Years

A recent news-item about XenoCloning
in South Korea has caused a world-widefuror. Dr. Park Se Pill, an embryologist from Seoul, South Korea who
trained in the US under Prof. Neal First at the University of Wisconsin, says
that "work on cross-species fusion of a human nucleus and an enucleated
bovine egg has now been discontinued at Maria Bio Tech after a number of
his team's preembryos went for about a week or so and then failed to continue
normal mitotic divisions." Thus, they were never able to achieve their
goal of obtaining human stem cells from the cloned embryo once divisions came
to a halt. Dr. Park speculated that the reason was "a failure to achieve
proper signaling between the maternal bovine mitochondria and the human
nucleus." However, Dr. Park predicted that "with enough practice this
barrier could be overcome by other scientists." [456]

We again wish to go on
record as asking the scientific community for a five-year moratorium -- this
time on Human Cross-Species Cloning.This is no longer a frivolous hypothetical. It has been recently rumored
that Dr. Sheng Huizhen, a US-trained biologist at the Shanghai No. 2 Medical
University in China, successfully derived human stem cells from an enucleated
rabbit egg implanted with a human nucleus. Furthermore, the US Patent Office
has received applications from ACT of Worcester, MA and from the College of
Veterinary Medicine at Seoul National University in South Korea on the
methodology for doing Human/Bovine XenoCloning. The arguments in favor of
XenoCloning are that animal eggs are considerably less expensive to obtain than
human eggs and that "it is a question of the freedom of scientists to use
whatever means that may be available to make progress," according to Dr.
Jung Sung Chul, a Section Chief at the Korean National Institutes of
Health.

However, our reasons for recommending against
pursuing Human XenoCloning are clear, independently of any moral reservations
from non-scientists. (For closely-related endangered-species XenoCloning or
surrogate mothering [like the recent case of the gaur/cow] may have legitimate
extenuating circumstances outside the scope of this argument.) First, we don't
have a clue about what we're doing as far as signaling between the nucleus and
the egg's ooplasm is concerned, mitochondrial or otherwise. So the closer we
get to perceived success, the more dangerous the experiment may be for the
ostensible recipient of any stem cells that are obtained. Secondly, we haven't
been successful with human eggs yet, not withstanding rumors to the contrary,
where the ostensible signaling problems should be easier to solve. At this
particular moment when the US Senate is about to vote on the future legality of
Human Cloning, we don't need to inject any new controversy about untrustworthy,
irresponsible scientists who will create "Frankenstein Hatcheries" if
left to their own devices. Our opponents will certainly exploit every
opportunity to paint all scientists with a disreputable brush to serve their
own end of "Banning all forms of Cloning," which is still a real
possibility..

C. Let's Defuse the
Rhetoric by Sharpening Our Vocabulary

On December 7, 2002 of
last year, we wrote that ordinary English has proven itself to be inadequate to
facilitate the debate that will soon be under way in the U.S. Senate. Wewould like to recommend the following
terminology whenever speaking about the distinction between HumanTherapeutic
Cloning and Reproductive Cloning, as follows:

1. The term preembryo shall be defined as a pre-implantation
zygote during the interval from conception to approximately [10 - 14] days
thereafter.Conception is the
fertilization of a human ovum (a haploid [n] female gamete) by a sperm
(a haploid [n] male gamete). A zygote contains a full [2n] complement of
chromosomes [22x2 + XY or XX = 46 chromosomes] in each and every cell. In
particular, a preembryo will normally develop by successive mitotic divisions
starting with a single diploid cell into a multicellular blastocyst first by forming
a morphological ball and later by invagination, that will subsequently contain
several hundreds of cells (including a large number of undifferentiated pluripotent
embryonic stem cells that are fated to form the tissues of the fetus).Blastocysts containing non-diploid cells are
typically pathological and will not normally implant.

2. The term embryo shall be reserved exclusively for a post-implantation
blastocyst that has begun the process of placentation (formation of a
placenta within the wall of the womb) accompanied by differentiation into three
fundamentally different tissue types (endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm),
with neural streak formation and the beginnings of organogenesis
(formation of a spinal cord).

3. The term fetus shall be reserved for a prenatal
post-organogenesis embryo that has developed mature limbs (with visible digits
[fingers and toes]), a beating heart, and other distinguishable features of a
human face (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and so on).

4. The term neonate (or baby) shall be reserved for a
post-fetus that has been delivered either vaginally or by C-Section and whose
umbilical cord has just been severed from its placenta.

5. The term person shall be reserved for an embryo whose fate
has been unambiguously determined to be a single individual (by
ultrasound or other visual means for examination). Note that a preembryo's fate
could be multiparous (as with identical twins [both male or both
female]), in which case there would be two (or more) persons derived from a
single preembryo. Conversely, note that, on rare occasions, two preembryos
(fraternal twins presumably of the same gender) could fuse to form a single
person (with chimera formation at the cellular level).

The value of this
careful terminology is to obviate the absurd, emotionally-charged religious
debates that arise from statements of the form: "People begin at
conception," which is completely inconsistent with the facts of biology.
One might just as well say that "People begin with eggs or sperm" or
"People begin with a twinkle in a man’s eye as he spies a beautiful woman
across the street." At what seemingly-arbitrary point should we seek to
punish someone for being disrespectful of sentient human life? Although we
cannot be sure of the precise moment, it seems to make the most sense, on
conservative grounds, to appreciate that, since preembryos can never be a
described as a person using the definitions above, we can never penalize someone for
"killing" a preembryo on moral grounds. In the same sense that one cannot be
charged with the crime of "killing" a dead person, one cannot be charged with the
crime of destroying or "killing" a preembryo. Linguistically speaking, the object of the
verb "kill" is required to be either a person or at least a living creature for the word to
even make sense in English. Just as one does not normally speak of killing your fingernail/toenail
clippings, except metaphorically, one cannot speak about "killing" a cluster of
undifferentiated cells that have not yet become a person, even though under the right
circumstances they may have the potential to become a person(s). .

D.
What do Germ Cells Know that Somatic Cells Don't?

It can now be argued
that, although the senescence of somatic cells in our bodies appears to be
immutable, our germ-line cells (eggs and sperm) are, by definition, what gives
sexually- reproducing species like ourselves their continuity over many
hundreds of thousands of years. So it seems that our germ cells
"know" something that our disposable somatic cells do not.
Discovering the molecular basis for the immortality of germ-line cells and how
their clocks can be reset through the process of fertilization and embryogenic
development may well be crucial to our ultimate understanding of the aging
process itself. [Of course, we know that both old eggs and old sperm (although
sperm are always freshly made, we are speaking here of sperm produced by older
males) do age statistically over time (as is well known to
gynecologists/andrologists who specialize in the diagnosis of infertility),
since older gametes do result in a higher rate of congenital defects among
those that are successful, despite the fact that there are many
"hoops" that all sperm must swim through to demonstrate their
virility and, among other things, outcompete the potentially contemporaneous
sperm of rival males.] Once the winning sperm penetrates an egg during
fertilization (no matter what the age of the male donor) resulting in a
successful pregnancy, the gametes can together perpetuate the species without
an apparent degradation in DNA quality over subsequent generations (in other
words, we are not successive copies on a Xerox machine, rendering the 10,000th
copy essentially unintelligible due to the classic accumulation of errors,
given a fixed signal-to-noise ratio); and this appears to be true for all
sexually-reproducing species. [Note that the biological process of speciation itself
(without which Homo sapiens would never have evolved from other (lower) species
on the preexisting phylogenetic tree) depends on a non-zero mutation rate
during DNA copying (enzymatic post-editing of freshly synthesized DNA does
bring the rate to within one error per billion nucleotide replications, which,
albeit small, is still "non-zero") which can help to explain many
forms of somatic pathology, like oncogenesis, for example.]

The "resetting of
the clock" may have to do with the membrane depolarization of the egg's
surface (very similar, we imagine, to the depolarization of a neural axon with
sodium/potassium channels) that serves to inhibit competing sperm from
attempting multiple penetrations (the so-called problem of polyspermy
[Curiously, in some species, polyspermy is physiologic and not pathological.])
except that the electrical charge runs over the spherical surface from one pole
to the other rather than linearly, as with the case of an axon. Alternatively,
there is also an accompanying calcium "tsunami" that travels through
the interior of the egg's cytoplasm (assumed to be rather like a seismic wave
that travels through rather than over the surface of the Earth) that may be
responsible for this "resetting." It may demethylate the nuclear DNA,
disrupt the nuclear membrane temporarily (so that paternal DNA can co-mingle
with maternal DNA and participate in "crossing over" activity), and
may also do something to reset the egg’s mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), for all we
know.

How do eggs and sperm
solve the problem of oxidative stress resulting from the over production of
free radicals that so badly damage senescent somatic cells?Their solution(s) are not obvious.We clearly need oxygen to survive,but ultimately, it's what probably kills us
too.Yet this hypothesis is too
simplistic. There are certain creatures, like parrots or bees, that adapt to
very different metabolic rates than we enjoy and yet exhibit very different
maximum lifespans. We believe that the key is somehow in the mitochondrial
defense mechanisms that process the Krebs Cycle and the Electron Transport
Chain in each species, not in the Oxygen molecules themselves. We need to
examine how mitochondrial membranes protect against free radicals in each
species' germ line and what happens when mitochondria get old. How are germ
linemitochondriadifferent from somatic mitochondria, if
indeed they are?Or maybe they’re just
protected differently.We should not
jump to the premature conclusion that oxidation (combustion) is to blame for
aging. Metabolism may be a very different process in young and old
organisms.

E. Xenotransplantation of
Custom Pig Organs into Humans

We believe that the
nay-sayers regarding dangerous pig viruses are focusing on the wrong problem
[355-360]. The fear of deadly swine retroviruses being inadvertently spread in
the general human population as a result of porcine transplants into a few
human recipients is like arguing "How many angles can dance on the head of
a pin?" or "How should we rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic
while it sinks." The media creates the impression that we're half way to
the moon, just because a few pioneers have climbed a mountain and jumped off a
cliff with feathers glued on to their arms furiously flapping away. The reality
is that we're not even at the "Wright Brothers" stage of going to the
moon. There is hardly a science of aeronautics let alone astronautics to draw
on. For example, does anyone know if the "double knock-out of the porcine
galactose gene" (GGTA1) isn't fatal to pigs? Maybe the surface markers are
there for a reason (for pigs)? And this is just the first hyper-immune
rejection problem of xenotransplantation. What about other antigenic markers on
porcine cell surfaces that will cause the cells to be killed off "more
slowly," once the human host Killer T-Cells discover that someone was
trying to "pull a fast one"? And what about the stimulation of latent
autoimmune diseases in the host, even if "foreign" antigens get to be
reasonably-well tolerated? Instead of letting the speculative day-traders run
up the stock of companies like Infigen, Inc. of DeForest, WI, as though a
clinical solution to rejection were just around the corner (Biotransplant
shares shares rose 9.8 percent in after-hours trading one day, while PPL's
stock soared 46 percent on the London Stock Exchange the next day. [354]), we
ought to let the real scientists work quietly for five more years to get their
arms around the problem. Instead, we get spikes of unfounded optimism (up
ticks) followed by unfounded disillusionment (down ticks) where "blind
shepherds are leading the sighted but stupid sheep." Aren't there any
long-term investors left?

F. Prof. Leon Kass, A
Panoply of Errors

Dr. Leon R. Kass,
President Bush’s choice last Summer to chair the President’s Council on
Bioethics, once stated his opposition to IVF as a “degradation of parenthood,”
However, he has long since changed his mind on this particular subject, and we
can forgive him this minor inconsistency.On the other hand, he has never changed his opinion regarding the
potential value of “Anti-Aging Medicine.”Just has he continues to oppose the more novel forms of interference in
the process of procreation, he is "adamantly opposed to scientific efforts
to conquer death," which he perceives to be a "necessary and
desirable end." [Sigh!]“The
finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual, whether
he knows it or not,” he says.Dr. Kass
sees it as “unfortunate that medical ‘progress’ has been set on a course to
erase human values and possibly destroy man himself.”In his writings, Dr. Kass refers to the soul to mean that
any living organism, even a bacterium, is not just a collection of molecules
but a thing with needs, desires, and awareness.” [1]

We wish to go on record
as being categorically and diametrically opposed to this point of view.It seems unlikely that we could ever
reconcile our contradictory views with Kass in our respective lifetimes.It’s almost as though Dr. Kass’s work was
translated into a foreign language and then back into English with a “not”
inadvertently inserted by a sloppy translator into virtually every
conclusion.This is not a problem of
not understanding English; we both appear to speak, read, and write our native
language fluently.Yet it seems as
though one of us is linguistically challenged in that we can’t even figure out
“Who human beings are?”We both agree,
I presume, that all forms of life should be treated with dignity and respect,
but attempting to turn a present necessity (death) into a virtue makes Dr. Kass
what we would call an “apologist for the status quo.”Let us examine the ways in which our positions diverge once the
fundamental premise about life is open to scrutiny:

1.Every life form is a
collection of molecules, and nothing more.There is no “soul.”There is no
metaphysical “ghost in the machine,” as it were.It is true that certain states of organization notnormally found in inanimate objects do
exhibit non-intuitive special “emergent” properties, like consciousness.But this does not mean that there exists an
independent spiritual entity that migrates to a different place once our
physical body ceases to exist.However,
denying the existence of a soul does not mean that humans, living or dead,
should be treated with any less dignity or respect.But it does mean that reductionism as a form of scientific
inquiry has no limitations in principle, as Dr. Kass would have us
believe.If, in the future, we can
engineer the neck genes so as to create a short-necked giraffe, there would be
nothing wrong, in principle, with doing so, even as a high-school science
project.It would only be wrong to
cause such a creature to suffer competition with long-necked giraffes in the
wild.So there are consequences that will
result from all the new options that will be provided to us by science and
technology in the future, and we must deliberate with great care in deciding
which options are worthy of exercising just because we can exercise
them.

2. The finitude of human life is not a blessing.To the contrary, it is a present (and
hopefully temporary) fact of life that has been thrust upon us by a “blind
watchmaker.”Dr.Kass fails to appreciate that “death is an
imposition on the human race,” and once the technical means present themselves,
“will become unacceptable,” as Alan Harrington wrote in the Introduction to his
book “The Immortalist,” a prescient manifesto published in 1969
[2]."We must cast off the
apologetic myth and strip away the protective orthodoxy's that have blocked
most of us from focusing on our real goal – achieving immortality, pure and
simple.Otherwise, we must confront our
personal mortality – the void into which we must all vanish if our
scientific/technology tools advance too slowly to help us within the interval
of our own lifetimes."

3. We actually agree with Dr. Kass that “the new immortals would not be
like us at all.”But rather than
deplore the notion that the human race could perish, as we know it, we should
embrace this transition. There is no
reason not to welcome the opportunity to escape from the predicament of the
human condition at long last.

4.Indeed death is neither necessary
nor desirable.Death, and its
precursor aging, is not inevitable; it is an artifact of sexual reproduction, a
system invented by a stochastic Darwinian machine with no concept of human
dignity.

In the future, our new
messiahs will be wearing white lab coats; they will not be members of the
clergy.We only wonder how long it will
take us from the completion last year of the first draft of the Human Genome
Project to the complete “parts list” (proteomics [5]) and the complete “blue
prints” (molecular embryology [6]) of the human organism to lead us back to the
“Garden of Eden,” from which we were expelled so long ago.Will it be 10 years? 15 years? 20
years?A word of caution is in order –
even having a complete parts list and a valid blueprint doesn’t guarantee success.There is still more work to be done to
figure out how to maintain an organism at a particular age while satisfying all
the metabolic constraints and while still preserving the architecture of the
tissues.By comparison, the current
political controversy that surrounds therapeutic vs. reproductive cloning seems
like “small potatoes.”Instead, we
should go for the “big enchilada.”

Nevertheless, looking
at the short term, as the controversial topic of human cloning is debated in
the US Senate, we should not lose sight of the fact that a “parts list” for a car
or a house is not the same as the car or the house
itself.Nor is a preembryo the same as
a human person.Fifty percent, or more,
of all fertilized eggs are unceremoniously flushed out with the menstrual
period unbeknownst to the Mother who had had intercourse that month but never
got pregnant presumably due to a failure of implantation. Note that the exact
statistics of “disappointed fertilizations” in the general population is not
known to physicians, since no one until recently ever had an incentive to
measure this rate precisely, and some OB/GYNs have estimated that only as
little as 20 percent of all fertilizations result in detectable pregnancies
(let alone live births). This means that the natural failure-to-implant rate
could be as high as 80 percent, whether due to primary congenital defects in
the preembryo or secondary temporary defects in the uterine lining of the
Mother.Of course, permanent defects in
the uterus lead to female-factor infertility.This is related to the so-called “seed” vs. “soil” problem.On the other hand, statistics for treatment
of couples complaining of infertility (for either parent-factor) are compiled
with great precision for obvious economic reasons.IVF still costs in the neighborhood of $5,000 per attempt with a
lot of personal inconvenience for the woman undergoing hyper-ovulation
treatment, and one doesn’t ever want to have to repeat the process, if it’s not
absolutely necessary. Even under the best of circumstances in the most
experienced hands, the success rates don’t go over 30 percent.This also explains why the number or twins
and triplets is so common using these procedures, and even worse how selective
reduction of embryos in high multiparous pregnancies (like five or more
embryos, where the presence of too many fetuses endangers the lives of all,
given the limited real estate in the womb) causes so much controversy.

This largely invisible
“yield” problem (to borrow a term from industrial manufacturing) is not really
a problem for Nature.Nature always
makes the most efficient trade-off in egg/sperm production for each species
according to survival statistics.No
one complains about the loss of female eggs every month (the so-called
“disappointed uterus” problem).No one
complains about the “wastage” of sperm every month.Why should we complain about the natural wastage of fertilized
eggs?This phenomenon is something that
was hardly even known to non-professionals.So why should we complain about the alternate use of preembryos for
therapeutic purposes? Yet in Kansas the state Legislature has just voted 70 to
50 to direct the Attorney General to file a lawsuit asking the Kansas Supreme
Court to make the declaration that “Life begins at Conception” [3].Hello.Of course, life begins at conception.But, so what?The real question
is not “Is it life?”, but “Is it a person?” What we need be careful about is to
identify whether the person lobbying in political terms has an ulterior motive
like winning “legal” rights for preembryos.The real purpose may well be torecognize embryos as people, and thereby deny mothers the right to an
abortion if they wish to have one. [4]This, of course, is the political agenda of the Anti-Abortion Movement
and is far beyond the scope of this limited discussion.

G.
So What Are the Chances of Beating the Grim Reaper?

The answer according
to Jeffrey Kluger in a recent issue of Time Magazine [456] is slim to
none. Citing sources like Prof. Leonard Hayflick, Ph.D. of the University of
California in San Francisco and Dr. Robert Butler, M.D. former Director of the
National Institute on Aging and now Head of the International Longevity
Institute in New York City, to support his argument, he concludes, "it is
theoretically possible [to do genetic engineering on senescent genes or introduce
proteins that block their operation], but with what could be thousands of genes
involved in aging, that may be as far beyond biologists as building a starship
is beyond rocket scientists."

Well, we don't think
so. Of the approximately 35,000 genes identified in the human genome so far,
there are likely to be no more than a few hundred gerontic
(longevity-determining) genes -- not thousands of such genes. [Dr. Richard
Cutler of the Kronos Longevity Research Institute and I have a bet on this
number that goes back to 1995.] But even if we allow for thousands of gerontic
genes instead of hundreds, so what? Does that mean that the problem is now
intractable? The fallacy of Mr. Kluger's logic is that he "reasons by
analogy," and his metaphor is flawed. His logic represents a "failure
of imagination." Egyptian pharaohs did not stop building pyramids because
they needed thousands of stones that weren't immediately available. They had a
vision. So did the Wright brothers. So did President John Kennedy when he said,
"Let's send men to the moon in ten years and return them safely back to
Earth."

So how do we refute
Mr. Kluger's pessimistic metaphor? Answer: By providing lots of counter
examples of how it could be done if we wanted to do it: (1) Let's say we wanted
to create a giraffe with a short neck? Could this be done as a high-school
science project? Certainly not today. But it might be doable in ten years by a
team of focused biotechnologists. (2) Similarly, let's say that we wanted to
create an elephant with a short trunk. Same answer. (3) Then for something a
lot more difficult... Let's say we start with a given four-legged mammal and
ask "What genes does one need to change to adapt it to full-time life in
the sea?" (not like a polar bear or a penguin or a seal or a walrus that
are all well adapted to underwater ocean swimming for very long periods of
time, but then spends variable amounts of time on land for other purposes). We
mean like a whale, a dolphin, or a manatee who never comes on land for any
purpose whatsoever.

Imagine all of the
genes one would have to modify to

(1) get the legs to stick together with a tail attached at the end for
vertical-motion propulsion (different from horizontal, in the case of
fish);

(4) get the nose to migrate from being above the mouth (where it presumably
serves to smell and thereby avoid eating spoiled food in land mammals) to the
top of the skull (where it can become a blow hole instead);

(5) sphericalize the eye lenses so as to better focus on distant
objects while under water; and

(6) recess the testicles and penis inside the body with proper
heterothermic temperature adaptations (significantly different resting
temperatures in different selected parts of the body) so as to create a
perfectly streamlined profile for faster swimming. Employing the jargon of
computer programmers who seek to add new functionality to someone else's code,
such an addition would be called a “patch.” Notice with regard to the latter
paradox, men share with all male mammals the seemingly-bizarre predicament of
having to place their testicles outside their body in a relatively vulnerable
location (while, conversely, female ovaries don't seem to mind functioning at
normal body temperatures) for the sake of some biochemical endothermic reaction
that we really don't understand at the molecular level but which is needed to
accommodate an exquisitely-stringent requirement for successful
spermatogenesis. The controlling enzymatic network of genes appears to be
"hard wired," as it has resisted any attempt to change it over millions
of years for the sake of just a few degrees of extra heat, when we first
decided that being warm-blooded had significant survival value for
mammals.

Anyway, its been done!
There are whales; there are dolphins; and there are manatees, who all decided
that they would be better off by going back into the ocean from whence they
originally came many moons ago. This fact of evolution provides an existence
proof. It may have taken a few hundred million years, but recall that this
reprogramming was accomplished using a "random-number generator,"
what we call “natural section” in the context of Darwinian Evolution. So maybe
that's why it took so much time.

When we have completed
the genomic sequencing of all mammals (from Aardvarks to Zebras) and have
catalogued every protein in each type of body (to be done in the next 20
years), we will know what it takes to go back to the ocean and not just to go
fishing. Therefore, adjusting the phenotype we call "lifespan,"
either up or down, if that's what we want to do, may suddenly become a
"piece of cake" for a genomic programmer, sort of like "twisting
a dial."

While it's true that
building a brand new full-scale Egyptian-style pyramid is still not a
high-school science project after four thousand years, even using modern
technology, nevertheless, architects and engineers could build one if we wanted
to (given a proper economic incentive or a religious imperative). But it does
require that we don't suffer a failure of nerve along the way. It would require
a shared vision.

On a more personal
note, when I worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for eight
years, I guess I could have been called a "rocket scientist" [even
though my official title was "Group Chief Technologist"]. And, in my
opinion, there's nothing stopping rocket scientists, in principle, from
building a starship if we ever had the collective will to do so [with apologies
to Gene Roddenbery of Star Trek, since our design might not look like The
U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701, which we're so used to seeing on television
every week].

Science and technology over the last century has shown us
that we can do essentially anything we set our minds to do (providing that it
doesn't violate the laws of physics). So as far as a biological starship is
concerned, what are we waiting for? Perhaps someone needs to issue a new
"Prime Directive" so we can get on with the engineering of a real
form of Anti-Aging Medicine.

H. Chinese
Scientists Sequence the Rice Genome

A team led by Profs. Yang Huanming (Chinese Academy
of Sciences) and Jun Yu (of the University of Washington in Seattle) with The
Beijing Genomics Institute in collaboration with the Torrey Mesa Research
Institute in San Diego (Stephen A. Goff) owned by Swiss agricultural giant Syngenta
International and with a contract to Myriad Genetics, Inc. of Salt
Lake City, UT spent about $30 million to complete the sequence of rice as
announced in today's issue of Science. Rice appears to contain [50 -
55],000 genes, compared with only about 35,000 for humans. Yet, humans have six
times more base pairs, which means that there is an average increase in density
of an order-of-magnitude (a lot less random repeats of nonsense DNA
apparently). Other cereal plants have considerably more DNA than rice. For
reference, barley has ten times more base pairs while corn has
five times more base pairs. Yet, there is a 98 percent homology between the
genes in rice, wheat, corn, and barley. "Unexpectedly, rice may turn out
to be the Rosetta Stone of all [plant] genome sequences," said Gane
Ka-Shu Wong at the University of Washington in Seattle.

A separate international
consortium led by Japanese scientists expects to complete their own version by
the end of the year," according to Dr. Takuji Sasaki, Chairman of the
International Rice Genome Sequencing Project. There are about 11,000 gaps still
needing to be filled in. "All the initial drafts of the different strains
of the rice genome sequences assembled by different collaborators should be
pooled and finalized in about 18 months" experts said. [467-470]

I.
Conclusions

We see no reason to
rush into the arena of human cloning until we have a much broader base of
knowledge to be obtained through experiments with mice, rats, primates, and
other mammals over the next five years.The reason suggested for accelerating the work with humans is the“opportunity cost” of those who may die of
diseases that could potentially be cured by human therapeutic-cloning
interventions [21].However, our
position is that there is no reason to rush at a time when the risks of making
mistakes for lack of technical understanding are so great, and the likelihood
of a damaging backlash by our political opponents is so great. Instead, we
should try to do it right.We need to
develop a joint government/university/pharmaceutical-industry research program
to understand the basic biology of stem cells and the chemokines that make them
tick, both the embryonic and the adult variety.If this can be done with mice and/or cows,
so be it.If it can be done with human
stem cells, consistent with the 64 cell lines approved by President Bush last
Summer, so be itThen clinical
interventions with human patients will make sense in due course when a great
deal of the uncertainty that now plagues this work can be resolved..

[Although this book is now out-of-print, the paperback edition from
1978 is still available in limited supply.]

[Note: The second half of the book, which discusses the
trajectory of scientific accomplishments from the popular press, has not stood
the test of time after more than 30 years; but the first half, which speaks to
the philosophical issues of apologism, is just as valid today as when it
was first written.Even Mr. Harrington
himself, whom I spoke to briefly in New York City in 1970, did not fully
understand how off-the-mark the scientific predictions would be by the time the
philosophical issues were ready to be considered seriously by the research
community.]

[This beautifully-animated description of the Human Genome Project and
its implications for society, primarily targeting the secondary-school
audience, takes a positive look at where technology is going.There is no hesitation by these
world-recognized scientists, following in the legacy of Watson and Crick, to
speculate about the implications of their work for significant increases in
human longevity.Their only caution is
that it may not be justaround the
corner, and when we get there, we will still have to debate how these
technologies are to be used for benefit of man.]

10. Calvin B. Harley, Jane S. Lebkowski, Melissa K. Carpenter, and
Thomas B. Okarma, "Response: Evidence that the Expansion of Human ES Cells
for Therapeutic Use Will Not be Hampered by Genetic Mutation Has Been Published
in Three Sets of Studies,"Science, Vol. 292, No. 5516, pp. 438-440 (April 20, 2001).

16. Eric Cohen, "The Politics of Cloning: We Must Soon Make Tough
Decisions about How to Regulate the Genetic Revolution. But in the Debate Over
Creating Human Life, Traditional Alliances Are No Longer Relevant," The
Los Angeles Times, pp. M1, M6 (Sunday, June 3, 2001).

[Eric Cohen is a former Managing Editor of The Public Interest and a
Resident Fellow at the New America Foundation. He states, "Stem cells and
cloning, however significant, are only the beginning... The mapping of the
human genome raises the prospect of not just new genetic therapies for disease
but genetic enhancements, or so-called "germ-line interventions,"
that would affect all future generations. Eventually, the line between therapy
and enhancement may become too difficult to draw -- with genetic backwardness
one day becoming the social equivalent of disease, and genetic equality
becoming the next social egalitarian crusade."]

[Dr. Guenin is a resident philosopher in the Department of Microbiology
and Molecular Genetics at the Harvard Medical School. He boldly takes on the
Catholic Church's position regarding "Zygotic Personhood" by defining
the notion of an epidosembryo and then quoting Aristotle's Historia
Animalium (583b, Vol. II, p. 109 in the Britannica Great Books
series; c. 335 B.C.) in which the notion of hylomorphism (the correspondence
of form and matter) permits one to conclude that an embryo without neural
tissue (before five weeks) cannot have a soul, and therefore cannot be
conscious, and therefore cannot be a person for purposes of the "duty not
to kill." This line of argument makes one appreciate the "debt of
gratitude" that we owe to the ancient Greek philosophers.]

[The authors state that "According to data supplied by the Centers
for Disease Control's National Center for Health Statistics approximately 3,000
Americans die every day from diseases that in the future may be treatable with
ES-derived cells and tissues."]

[Since May 1997, the St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, NJ has
conducted 30 ooplasmic transfers in which mitochondria from the eggs of younger
donors appeared to rejuvenate the eggs of older women that were subsequently
fertilized by sperm from their husbands, resulting in 16 live births. This
greater than 50 percent success rate is much higher than the traditional rate
of about 30 percent at even the best IVF Clinics. The only concern is that the
babies have genetic material from three parents (remember that mitochondria
have unique mtDNA){Note: Inherited mitochondrial pathologies are
extremely rare.} But, does the FDA have the legal authority to prohibit this
sort of IVF research, which they've never done before?]

66. July 12/13, 2001. Stem Cell Research: A National Public Radio
Special Report.

[The debate over stem cell research is gaining visibility, as President
Bush is expected to announce soon whether his Administration will permit
federal funding for research using cells from human embryos. The pressure
surrounding the decision has been intense: The NIH, Secretary of Health and
Human Services Tommy Thompson, and a growing number of Republican lawmakers all
urge the president to pay for research. But others inside the White House
oppose the funding, saying research on cells derived from human embryos is
unethical and should be banned.Many
scientists are convinced that studying these cells will reveal a wealth of
knowledge about the basic biology of human beings, and could lead to treatments
for a variety of disease. So even without Federal support, embryonic stem cell
research will proceed -- but at a much slower pace.]

73. July 18, 2001; A new 200-page NIH Report entitled "Stem Cells:
Scientific Progress and Future Research Directions -- Opportunities and
Challenges: A Focus on Future Stem Cell Applications" (June 19, 2001) and
is now available for free download from the Internet.

[Note:C-SPAN-TV Congressional testimony provided by Dr.
Michael West, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, who lectured his opponents with
stories from the Bible (the Tower of Babel and "When I was a child, I
spoke like a child...") I rather suspect that, although his opponents may
enjoy quoting from the Bible themselves, they don't like to have the Bible
quoted back to them. Therefore, it is unlikely that any compelling arguments
were made that would change the minds of the opponents. On an unrelated matter,
one of the Senators asked Dr. West his estimate of how much money was being
invested in stem-cell research by the private sector in this country, and he
replied that, "between the two companies currently supporting this area in
a significant way {presumable Geron and ACT}, the combined total might be $10
million per year." To place this number in perspective, these same
Senators are used to dealing not with millions but with billions of dollars in
the context of other Federal Government appropriations, making this issue
appear, from their point of view, to be a "tempest in a teapot," in
terms of the amount of time it was consuming.]

[Dr. Roger Pedersen of the University of California in San Francisco
will leave the US to go to the University of Cambridge, UK, where public
funding of embryonic stem-cell research is more readily obtained.]

92. John Balzar, "No Steam Over Stem Cell," The Los
Angeles Times, p. B15 (July 27, 2001); ["Surely we cannot argue over
each new development, like we have been doing with stem-cell research all the
way to the White House, without overlooking 10,000 other important scientific
biological issues."]

93. Jeremy Rifkin, "Will Companies Hold Control of Life Made in a
Petri Dish?," The Los Angeles Times, p. B11 (July 23,
2001).

[Germond says, "Of all the issues on the table today, the most
politically dangerous is the debate over Federal funding of stem-cell
research"; and the Pope is said to have made a passionate plea to President
Bush to ban embryonic stem-cell research, saying "this is one of the great
moral questions of the new century."]

[Dr. Peter Mombaerts, a scientist at the Rockefeller University in New
York who has cloned mice, estimates that "fewer than three dozen
researchers in the U.S. truly understand the possibilities inherent in cloning
research." Furthermore, this ban, if it ever becomes law, is likely to
have some unintended victims, particularly new fertility techniques such as
'egg reconstruction.' Dr. Michael West, CEO of ACT in Worcester, MA said that
they have applied for a patent on a process called "ooplasmic
transfer," which is, in effect, the reverse of therapeutic cloning. By
dribbling the soupy liquid inside an egg on top of an adult cell, 'like water
balloons,' it seems that it might possible to dedifferentiate that adult cell
into its embryonic state."]

{Note: This sounds like a "sledge hammer" approach compared
to the sort of "scalpel" type of approach that we could achieve once
we have a detailed map of the human proteome and have cataloged all of the
embryogenic specialization tissue-communication molecules. But remember that it
is not really enough to know what the communication/tissue-specialization factors
are. Their concentration might be just as important as their makeup in
"instructing" cells about their respective fates. It is already
known, for example, that when one doubles the concentration of a particular
immune cytokine in the thymus gland that blank T-helper cells can be
"educated" to differentiate into a totally different type of white
blood cell. So there is not a simple one-to-one correspondence between the
complete table of cytokines and the table of cell types. It is much more complicated
than that.]

[In this article, we learn that Dianne Irving, a biologist who now
specializes in philosophy and bioethics and is a consultant to the American
Life League, has written a position paper that suggests that individual
stem cells may have the potential to become "whole embryos." Dr. Paul
Berg, a Nobel Laureate and Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University,
called the paper "utter nonsense."]

[Laura Minges, who is herself a victim of Cerebral Palsy, argues that
disabilities are no excuse to prematurely eliminate people who are born with
congenital afflictions, using a prenatal diagnosis of some sort to abort them
before they are born. They, after all, have a right to live too. I hate to
sound patronizing to someone with a disability, but I believe we all have a
duty to expose flawed reasoning whenever it appears. It reminds me of the
paradoxical statement made by a congenitally deaf person that "deafness is
a superior state compared with the 'hearing state' on the grounds that 'silence
had greater degree of acoustic purity'."]

[Mr. Mark Hunt, an attorney who lost his ten-year-old son in 1999, has
withdrawn his support from Dr. Brigitte Boisselier of the Raelian Movement due
to a loss of confidence. On August 7th, the media revealed that Mr. Hunt had
invested $500,000.]

[The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) of Madison, WI is
suing Geron Corp. of Menlo Park, CA over the alleged expiration of
exclusive-rights options on various cell lines. WARF wants to distribute cell
lines to other academic researchers while Geron insists that any clinical
application of the cell lines must be licensed from them directly.]

146. George F. Will, "Extremism in the Pursuit of Science Is No
Virtue," The Los Angeles Times, p. B13 (August 14,
2001).

[Michael West, CEO of ACT in Worcester, MA, said "Using proteins
found in egg-cell protoplasm, it may be possible to prompt adult cells, such as
skin cells, to revert to stem cells similar to those in embryos."]

[Note: I received a message on my daily newswire service
downloaded to my beeper on Monday afternoon, August 13th that a reporter at Newsweek
Magazine found evidence that the President actually made the policy
decision, which he reported in his Thursday night Address-to-the-Nation, one
month ago (rather than one day before [on Wednesday], as reported by White
House Staff the next day [Friday]) which is consistent with my own hypothesis
explained in the third paragraph of the August 9th news item above]

["Newsweek reports in its latest issue that the President
had made up his mind to proceed with Federally-funded stem-cell research back
in early July. Indeed, the magazine asserts that while the NIH suggested
proceeding with just 30 cell lines, the White House upped it to 60. Why? Newsweek
suggests that Bush wanted to empower enough stem-cell lines so that he wouldn't
have to confront the issue again."]

["... he is signaling compromise. The fist was his decision on the
funding of stem-cell research. Now the Administration is taking the soft road
on an important case..."]

171. Paul Conrad, "Political Cartoon, But on the Other Hand [Man
with two heads holds a science book on Stem-Cell Research]," The Los
Angeles Times, p. B13 (August 15, 2001).

172. Danziger, "Political Cartoon, Stem Cells are like way cool. I
mean let's say I hit a huge-O tree and paralyze my brain. I go home and stick
some stem cells in my ear, and in a couple of weeks I'm back on the road..
[Man, driving a convertible sports car, to a woman], " The Los Angeles
Times, p. B13 (August 15, 2001);

["Unlike liberals who see the stem cell debate as further proof
that Bush is a 'front man,' I see it as proof that Bush can reflect and grow.
Now if only Bush would turn these newfound muscles to the ways America values
the born, not just the unborn."]

248. Bert Vogelstein, “When A Clone Is Not a Clone” (National Academy
of Sciences, Washington, D.C.; December 7, 2001).

249. Stem Cells and the Future of Regenerative Medicine
(Committee on the Biological and Biomedical Applications of Stem Cell Research,
Board on Life Sciences, National Research Council, Board on Neuroscience and
Behavioral Health, Institute of Medicine; National Academy of Sciences;
Washington, D.C.; 112 pages; 2002).

250. Scientific and Medical Aspects of Human Reproductive Cloning
(Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, Policy and Global
Affairs Division, Board on Life Sciences, Division on Earth and Life Studies,
National Research Council; Washington, D.C.; 350 pages; 2002).

266. Andrew Pollack, "New Work May Provide Stem Cells While Taking
Baby From Equation," The New York Times, p. D3 (November 6, 2001).

[This article speculates about the prospects for parthenogenesis {embryogenesis
without prior fertilization}. Although a parthenote {an embryo resulting
from parthenogenesis} would normally be female because one must start by
chemically or electrically stimulating an egg, the procedure could be designed
to produce male parthenotes as well, by using techniques involved in
therapeutic cloning by first enucleating the egg and reinserting chromosomes
from an adult male nucleus or from two identical sperm {or even
male/male pathenotes from two different sperm donors (or fathers)}. Dr. Michael
West, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, MA) was asked by the
reporter if any of these speculations had been attempted in humans, but he
tactfully replied that he "didn't want to discuss human experiments at
this time, lest he jeopardize an upcoming publication in a scientific journal.
{Note: To my knowledge, no such experiments have been reported in the
scientific literature as of this date, although, for other mammals, female
parthenotes were first produced for mice and rabbits more than ten years ago,
and, parthenogenesis was accomplished for frogs in the 1950s at Oxford
University in England.}].

[Abstract: Human therapeutic cloning requires the reprogramming
of a somatic cell by nuclear transfer to generate autologous totipotent stem
cells. We have parthenogenetically activated 22 human eggs and also performed
nuclear transfer in 17 metaphase II eggs. Cleavage beyond the eight-cell stage
was obtained in the parthenogenetic-activated eggs, and blastocoele cavities
were observed in six. Three somatic cell-derived embryos developed beyond the
pronuclear stage up to the six-cell stage. The ability to create autologous
embryos represents the first step towards generating immune-compatible stem
cells that could be used to overcome the problem of immune rejection in
regenerative medicine.]

[Note: Although this is a relatively brief paper, we believe
that it actually could have been split into two shorter papers with different
titles, since two radically different methodologies were being utilized to
develop the embryos {Parthenogenic Activation (PA) and Somatic Cell Nuclear
Transfer (SCNT)}. The reasons for the failure of the embryos to thrive
(continue to cleave in vitro) beyond a three-day period was never made
clear, contributing to confusion over why embryonic stem cells were never
obtained, which was the original goal of the project.This criticism was written on November 30, 2001, long before the
controversy over this publication was made public.]

270. Joannie Fischer, "The First Human Clone: How American
Scientists Made History by Creating Lifesaving Embryo Cells: The Breakthrough
Promises Cures for Terrible Diseases," U.S. News and World Report,
Vol. 131, No. 23, pp. 50-63 (December 3, 2001).

[Regarding the distinction between Therapeutic and Reproductive
Cloning, Dr. West stated in this article that "Due to potential health
risks Reproductive Cloning is 'unwarranted at this time' and 'should be
restricted' until the safety and ethical issues surrounding it are
resolved."]

278. Antonio Regalado, Gautam Naik, and Jull Carroll, "Study Finds
That Cloned Cattle That Live to Adulthood Are Normal: Research Could Play a
Role as FDA Ponders Regulations; Some Question the Findings," The Wall
Street Journal, pp. A1, B1, 5 (November 23, 2001).

{Dr. Anthony Perry formerly with the University of Hawaii and who
pioneered the "Honolulu Technique" for cloning mice said,
"Cloning is as much of an art as a science. Some people develop a feel for
the work, while others, no matter how hard they try, never get very good at it.
It requires fine hand-eye coordination and constant practice under the
microscope." For example, he reportedly worked on his technique ten
hours-a-day seven days-a-week for months before he got reasonably good.
"If you stop practicing even for two weeks, you tend to get rusty," he
said.]

280. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Bush Denounces Cloning and Calls for
Ban: New Research Puts Pressure on Senate to Act on a Divisive Issue," The
New York Times, p. A12 (November 27, 2001).

282.Michael Ramirez, Political
Cartoon, Three White-Coated Mad Scientists Are Stabbing a Newborn Baby on the
Alter of "SCIENCE," One Says, "You Lucky Guy You, We Are
Sacrificing You to the God of Immortality," The Los Angeles Times,
p. B11 (November 27, 2001).

[Dr. Jose Cibelli of ACT presented a report to the National Research
Council yesterday in Washington, D.C. on their work on human therapeutic
cloning. He said, "If cloning works properly, it will reset the 'clock.'
Imagine having a brand new [healthy juvenile] immune system starting up in your
70s." However, others said, "That's just a fantasy." Cibelli
reposted, "We haven't promised that people would live
forever."]

284. AP -- "The U.S. Senate Is in No Rush to Ban Cloning,"
(November 28, 2001).

["...But the researchers at ACT are not the evil Dr. Frankensteins
that some legislators are making them out to be. As Rep. James C. Greenwood
(R-PA) pointed out in a Congressional debate about cloning two months ago,
"Some will say, 'But wait a minute, once you put [my] cheek cell into this
empty cell and it divides, we have a soul.' ... That's ridiculous."]

["Genetic problems occur when an embryo gets its start through
cloning rather than sexual fertilization... Rather than a flat ban [as the
House of Representatives recommended last July], a five-year ... moratorium
would allow further knowledge to be accumulated about mammalian cloning as well
as serious, sustained reflection about the sort of world that human cloning
could engender... Also, a moratorium should reassure researchers and patient
advocates that if it becomes apparent that laboratory cloning is essential to
achieving important therapeutic goals, that the door has not been closed
forever."]

[Dr. John Gearhart of Johns Hopkins University told Reuters that the
effect of this announcement was "to scuttle backstage talks among
congressional staffers on how to reach a compromise on the use of embryos in
research."]

["Experts in the field of reproductive biology questioned the real
motives behind ACT's Announcement, since they viewed it as non-innovative and
merely as an act to gain notoriety... This was simply a ploy to create a media
event and thereby attract new investors in its upcoming find-raising
effort."]

[December 4, 2001; London, UK; British lawmakers will ban humanreproductive but nottherapeutic cloning. TheHuman Reproductive Cloning Act 2001 was
rushed through Parliament after a High Court decision that the government had
no control over the use of embryos created by cloning.]

[Prof. John Gearhart of Johns Hopkins University reportedly told
Reuters News Service that "ACT's announcement has caused congressional
staffers to scuttle backstage talks on reaching a compromise on the use of
embryos in research."]

301. Harold Varmus, "The Weakness of Science for Profit," The
New York Times, p. A23 (December 4, 2001).

[William A. Haseltine, Editor of the Journal of Regenerative Medicine
in which ACT detailed its experiments, defended the work as the beginning of a
long-term effort to make replacement cells and tissues for people. He said,
"This is not a big step; this is just the first step."]

305. Hillary Rosner "Body and Soul: The First Great Bioethics
Debate Began 2000 Years Ago with a Clash Between the Scalpel and the
Cross," Wired, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 90-91 (January 2002).

[Infigen and ACT are suing each other over the terms of a confidential
patent settlement. On the moral front, some livestock owners are deeply
conservative and are uncomfortable with cloning. "There are people who
think that this is something you don't taper with." Yet, according to one
dairy farmer, Mr. Robert Schauf, in the Bible it says, "God gave man
dominion over the animals, and God gave [scientists] the ability to figure out
[cloning]. That's my feeling."]

[See especially the Chapters 5 and 6 entitled, "Regenerative
Medicine" and "The Quest for Immortality," respectively (pp.
119-163). These chapters discuss the topic of telomerase in cell
culture.]

338.. Mark Ridley,The
Cooperative Gene: How Mendel's Demon Explains the Evolution of Complex Being (The
Free Press, New York; 2001).

[Mark Ridley is a zoologist at Oxford University (not to be confused
with his fellow countryman, Matt Ridley, a Science Editor who also writes on
the topic of genomics (Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters)
who says that "evolution of complex animals on the Earth was by no means
inevitable and is, in fact, rather counterintuitive." In comparing
Dawkins' notion of the "selfish" gene, Ridley doesn't mean to say
that Dawkins is wrong. It's just that Dawkins notion is insufficient to explain
how life could have evolved from simple, one-celled organisms to complex,
highly-organized living systems that walk on, swim in, or fly over the Earth.
Somewhere between the bacteria and us primates perhaps at about the stage of
simple microscopic worms God did have to "play dice" (under the
constraints of Natural Selection). How to channeling photonic-energy into such
complexity using a chaotic mechanism is not obvious... But the only thing that
has kept humans from evolving into a still more complex life form is our
genetic mutation rate. The complexity of a species is the result of an
evolutionary equilibrium between the raw DNA-polymerase mutation rate which
facilitates the process of speciation (Note that the absolute number of
mutations increases with the size of the genome and ours is 3 Giga base pairs)
on the one hand and the correctional mechanisms like post-copy proofreading or
editing enzymes and the invention of sexual reproduction (with diploid
chromosomes and Mendelian Inheritance (dominant/recessive genes) on the
other.]

[A graph of PPL Therapeutics stock price for {Dec. 28th to Jan. 8th}
is shown in this short article revealing a 30 percent uptick on January 3rd
with the announcement of the birth of the pigs followed by a 25 percent
downtick over the next days following the announcement of Dolly's arthritis on
January 4th.]

[Dr. Studer stated that "the relative ease with which
dopamine-producing cells developed from the injected ES cells suggests that
there might be a way to prompt rare stem cells already in the brain to become
dopamine-producing neurons, allowing doctors to avoid the issue of
transplanting cells altogether."]

[Report by a state-appointed advisory panel urges a State Senate
Committee to permanently extend the state's current ban on human reproductive
cloning but permit the cloning of human embryonic stem cells for medical
research.]

[James Kallinger, Republican Florida State Legislator from the Orlando
area who introduced the bill, said, "whether or not [the cloning] took
place in Florida, clones, their relatives, and estates could also sue for
emotional distress and other injuries. This sends a message, as far as Florida
courts can reach, to scientists trying to clone humans."]

377. "The Jones Fertility Institute in Norfolk, VA said that it
will now terminate work it started in July to create human embryos for the sole
purpose of harvesting stem cells," The Wall Street Journal, p. A1
(January 18, 2002).

["Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) has proposed a new Bill (S. 1893)
similar to one proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)(S. 1758). Feinstein's
Bill would keep the door open for research using cloned embryos but impose
civil penalties on anyone who tries to clone a human being. Harkin's Bill adds
criminal penalties to the mix. More than 20 research organizations have already
endorsed Feinstein's Bill over competing legislation backed by Sen. Sam
Brownback (R-KS) that would ban both reproductive and therapeutic cloning (S.
790). The next step will be hearings on Bronback's Bill in March or April with
a full Senate debate coming sometime later."]

[Dr. Catherine Verfaillie, biologist at the University of Minnesota,
testified in a Senate Subcommittee yesterday in Washington, D.C., "Even
though we're excited about the fact that there appear to be cells in adult
tissue that seem to have greater potential than we thought they would, it's too
soon to say whether they have the equivalent potentiality of embryonic
cells."]

[The February issue of Blood reports that stem cells transplants
were performed on 117 Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (SCID) children over 19
years at Duke University. Of the 21 who received transplants in the first four
weeks, 20 are still alive and leading normal lives. The oldest is already
19.]

[A chorus of scientific detractors, who point to serious potential
flaws in the experiment by ACT to clone a human embryo, say that the embryos,
one of which divided into just six cells after five days, all died because
"the cells were actually fragmentingand not undergoing true cell-cycle mitotic division [with chromosomal
synthesis and segregation into distinct nuclei]." Three leading scientists
formerly on the e-Biomed: The Journal of Regenerative Medicine Editorial
Board resigned in protest because of their unhappiness over the "rush to
publication." EvenProBio, Inc.,
an Australian intellectual property rights company that owns the license for
one of the cloning techniques used by ACT, shrugs off the importance of the
company's "achievement. "It may serve more of a media function than a
scientific one," said ProBio CEO Laith Reynolds. On the other hand, Dr.
William Haseltine, Editor-in-Chief ofe-Biomed, defended the decision to publish this paper as follows:
"I stand by the scientific process which means that the manuscript was
reviewed by people knowledgeable in the field. It's up to other scientists to
determine whether the science is sound."]

[Prof. John P. Gearhard, M.D., Ph.D., of Johns Hopkins University
Medical School and a former Member of the Editorial Board of e-Biomed: The
Journal of Regenerative Medicine announced his resignation from the Board
over this matter. "I feel very embarrassed and chagrined by this
publication," he said in an interview with the BBC. Mrs. Mary Ann Liebert,
the Journal's publisher, was planning to meet with Dr. Gerhard to attempt to
change his mind.]

[This particular Editorial was a very hostile attack, employing phrases
like "the ludicrous manner ... in which this modest announcement was
made... should serve as a warning to all companies that intend to publicize
their research..."]

[Geron Corp., Infigen, Inc., and ACT May All Litigate Over Patents. The
US Patent Office may have to resolve competing claims by these three companies
in a so-called Interference Process that could take two years before
they decide whose claims about what were filed soonest.]

[Competitors seem to be lurking everywhere. A new company called
Stemron Corp. of Gaithersburg, MD (Arthur Mandell, formerly an executive for
business development at Human Genome Sciences is the CEO) says that they
"wish to develop universal human stem cell lines based on [200 -
300] parthenotes that could provide close matches for the majority of the U.S.
population." Stemron has filed three patents covering
parthenogenically-derived stem cells from a tissue bank. This is the "Red Cross
blood-bank" model of cellular therapy, but there are many reasons to
believe that such a model would not obviate the "rejection problem,"
and that human therapeutic cloning would still be needed on a case-by-case
basis for each host. At last check, the Stemron website was still "under
development."]

[Scientists at Infigen, Inc. have announced that they cloned piglets
from the ear cells of two prized boars. This is the first time that a pig has
been cloned from an adult cell, as opposed to fetal cells. One of the goals of
cloning farm animals is to be able to duplicate prized animals precisely, but
there are potential human therapeutic applications as well, involving organ
transplantation without rejection.]

410. Michael Ramirez, Cartoon: Political Commentary: Picture of two men
talking and being stared at by dozens of stray cats in an alley, "Some
people may consider pet cloning frivolous, but how else could I replace my
little fluffy wuffy kitty-pooh?" The Los Angeles Times, p. M5
(February 17, 2002).

[Two self-righteous letter-writers from Encinitas and La Verne,
California are incensed that the cloners of "CC" wasted precious
resources doing a scientific "parlor trick" (prestidigitation) at
great expense, when all they had to do was visit their local animal shelter, if
all they wanted was to have another kitten. Note: But why do rich people
indulge the presence of poverty in their midst? All they would have to do would
be to give away their money; or more to the point, why do even poor people
bother to have their own children when all they would have to do would be to
adopt an orphan, many of whom will never be so lucky as to be adopted before
their time runs out? Throughout history, nearly all wealthy individuals have
indulged themselves in selfish pursuits, regardless of the envious opinion of
poor people -- mostly in secret, but occasionally in conspicuous, ostentatious
public displays. Frequently, it has been these wealthy persons -- and their
foundations -- who have contributed the most to scientific progress. Thanks to
them and their self-indulgent pursuits, real scientific progress has been made
for the benefit of everyone. Otherwise, as my Aunt Tillie said, "we
shouldn't be going to the moon. We should stay home and watch television the
way God intended us to."]

["Britain is also setting up a National Stem-Cell Bank -- similar
to a blood bank -- to store the cells and make them available to
researchers." However, it is not yet clear, based on the published
scientific literature, whether the Universal Stem-Cell-Donor/Blood-Bank
Model or the Patient-Specific-Therapeutic-Cloning/Autologous-Transfer
Model will be the one that finally succeeds in overcoming the problem of
acute rejection.]

[Cloned mice developed obesity when they reached adulthood, according
to a new study that raises doubts about cloning animals for human
transplantation and about cloning humans themselves. Dr. Ian Wilmut, the
pioneer researcher who cloned the sheep Dolly, says the report raises
the question of whether any clones are entirely normal.]

[This article reveals that the secret location of Dr. Brigitte
Boisselier's US Cloning Lab, before it was shut down by the FBI in April 2001,
was actually Nitro, West Virginia. The Raelian's new secret lab is somewhere
abroad. Monsieur Vorilhon (The Prophet Rael) has claimed that 3,000 persons
(followers?) have signed up for Clonaid's reproductive services. The first
human clone, according to their leader, will be like the Messiah.]

[Prof. Lu Guangxiu of Xiangya, China May Have Beaten ACT to the First
Human Clone "China's policy makers are rushing to embrace therapeutic
cloning as a potential tool for extending human life." Although the
Xiangya team has not yet published in Western journals, "they are
beginning to realize that they need to subject their work to scientific
scrutiny to win the global recognition they deserve." One of the Chinese
innovations in technique is leaving the egg's nucleus in tact while injecting
the donor nucleus in close proximity. Then, they allow both to grow -- in some
cases for as long as ten hours -- before enucleating the egg's nucleus just
before the egg would normally undergo mitosis. This technique helps to preserve
the normal volume of ooplasm which is frequently depleted when the nucleus is
removed first, as is normally the case. The little-understood chemokines in the
egg's cytoplasm are what appear to facilitate the egg's ability to return the
donor-nucleus DNA to an "embryonic" state. (maybe demethylation?) in
which it is capable of developing into a preembryo.]

[In today's issue of the journalCell, Dr. George Q. Daley of the MIT Whitehead Institute in
Cambridge, MA, reported on a potent combination of therapeutic cloning, stem
cells, and gene therapy partly restored health to mice inflicted with Severe
Combined Immune Deficiency (SCID). One surprise, however, was that the limited
immune systems of the sick mice still attempted to attack the autologous cloned
cells as though they were "foreign." The theoretical promise of
therapeutic cloning is that the autologous tissues should never be rejected,
but that has yet to be proven. "It is much more complicated than we
imagined," Dr. Daley said. (Note: Could it be that embryonic surface
antigens on the stem cells are construed as "cancer," and even a
limited immune system attempts to trigger apoptosis in neoplastic cells? This cannot
be the complete answer, but we really need to investigate this phenomenon
urgently to rule out alternative hypotheses of adult immune surveillance
attempting to destroy cells exhibiting embryonic antigens. Perhaps,
differentiating the cells in culture before inoculation will conceal their
embryonic origin and return them to a state of "tolerance.")]

[Adult stem cells may not be as promising a source for tissue
regeneration as embryonic stem cells, studies in the current issue of Nature
suggest. Scientists at the University of Edinburgh in SCOTLAND and the
University of Florida in Gainsville found that adult cells failed to show an
ability to copy tissue they were injected into.]

[Three Editorial Board Members of theJournal of Regenerative Medicine resign because of ACT
publication: Dr. Davor Solter from the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology
in GERMANY; John Gearhart of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in
Baltimore, USA; and Robin Lovell-Badge of the National Institute of Medical
Research in London, UK all felt that they could not endorse the findings as
published by ACT last November 2001 and have resigned in protest.]

[Australian scientists have apparently won their campaign to use stem
cells taken from spare IVF embryos for research, winning the support of the
prime minister and state ministers. Quoting senior government sources, the
paper said that "during a special meeting of cabinet last week ministers
had warned that Australia risked losing world-class scientists offshore if it
banned the use of the embryos for stem-cell research." "[Prime
Minister John] Howard will consult with church leaders before finalizing his
decision on embryonic stem-cell research before a meeting of state ministers
next week," his deputy John Anderson said today.]

["It is a truism that the blastocyst has the potential to become a
human being. Yet at that stage of development it is simply a 'clump' of
cells... An analogy might be what one sees when walking into a Home Depot.
There are the parts for at least 30 homes. But if there is a fire at the Home
Depot, the headline doesn't read '30 Homes Burn Down.' It's 'Home Depot
Burns Down'.”

–Michael Gazzaniga, Dartmouth
University Neuroscientist at a meeting of the President's Bioethics Panel last
month in Washington, D.C.]

452. Sophie Petit-Zeman, "Regenerative Medicine: The Regeneration
of Tissues and Organs Offers a Radical New Approach to the Treatment of Injury
and Disease. It's a New Medicine for a New Millennium, but Does the Reality
Match the Hype?" Nature Biotechnology, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 201-206
(March 2001).

["Although Dr. Fukuyama credits science and
technology with giving a forward direction to history over the last 500
years," he says that "human cloning should be banned outright,"
since he regards it as "immoral in and of itself and as an opener for
still worse things to come, like enhancing human qualities by germline genetic
engineering."]

[All four of these letters were decidedly hostile
to Dr. Kass's position.]

465. Letter to the Editor by Rev. Alexander
Harper of Norwalk, CT, "Criticism of a Moralist," The New York
Times, p. F4 (April 2, 2002).

[However, the following week a minister from
Connecticut wrote a letter about the four letters: "I was disappointed at
letters (of March 26th cited above) only in caustic criticism of the
President's choice of Dr. Leon Kass as Chairman of the President's Council on
Bioethics. As a teacher of a course on the Science and Ethics of Stem-Cell
Research, I am thankful that we have such a thoughtful scientist as Dr.
Kass, who has kept his sense of humane values as Head of such an important
Advisory Council for the President. As war is too important to leave to the
generals, so are the consequences of bioengineering too important to leave to
laboratory technicians."]

466. Editorial, "Indiana Jones Goes to
D.C.," The Los Angeles Times, p. B16 (March 28, 2002).
["Concerns raised about where [Elias] Zerhouni stands on cloning and
stem-cell research are to the point. At Johns Hopkins, Zerhouni played a key
role in developing such research, arguing that it should be "as unimpeded
as possible, because it may have a huge potential for all mankind."
However, the Bush Administration has suggested recently that Zerhouni would
support constraints favored by the far right, specifically a Bill by Sen. Sam
Brownback (R-KA) that would criminalize even the cloning of a person's own
cells to treat illnesses such as Parkinson's Disease.]

[Prof. Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute at
MIT was both angry and skeptical at the news. "I do not trust these people
to tell us the truth," he said "The best outcome for such a baby
would be death before birth."]

[Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, MA has
reportedly used therapeutic cloning to derive bovine stem cells to create
kidneys that it has transplanted into adult cows. Dr. Robert Lanza of ACT has
confirmed these reports but declined to offer any further details, noting that
"the company planned to publish its results soon."]

[The National Institute for Infectious Diseases
in Tokyo reported in the March 2002 issue of Nature Genetics that cloned
animals have a shorter-than-normal-lifespan. In one of the experiments,
10 of 12 cloned mice died within 800 days of birth, whereas only 1 of 7 mice
produced through natural mating died within that span. Autopsies conducted on
six cloned mice that appeared to die prematurely revealed liver damage and
pneumonia, suggesting a weakened immune system compared with normal controls.]

[Researchers at Johns Hopkins University injected
specially-altered embryonic stem cells into the spinal cords of rats that were
paralyzed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease), and "three months later, the
rats were able to move their paralyzed hind quarters and walk, although
clumsily." Although adult stem cells are now being successfully used in
transplants, more research is needed to determine whether they hold the same
promise as embryonic stem cells.]

[President George W. Bush used his pulpit in the
East Room of the White House to lecture Americans and undecided Senators with a
15-minutes sermon on "the meaning of human life." There was an
invitation-only audience of obviously sympathetic listeners providing hearty
applause at all the right places. The level of orchestration was so tightly
scripted and professionally rehearsed, the lecture had the look and feel of a
mini "State-of-the-Union" address scripted by a Hollywood director to
perpetrate the illusion that he spoke for all Americans, even though this is a
highly controversial topic for many of us. He "preached to a choir"
of 175 sympathetic lawmakers, religious activists, researchers, and even some
disabled people, issuing abstract platitudes like " life is a creation
not a commodity." And furthermore, "No human life should be
exploited or extinguished for the benefit of another."

On the other hand, 40 Nobel Prize Winners were
not convinced. They signed a letter the same day distributed to the Senate,
saying that therapeutic cloning was actually a good idea for
Americans and it should certainly not be criminalized, warning that a
legislative ban "would impede progress against some of the most
debilitating diseases known to man."

However, the mood of the Senate on this issue is
fiercely independent of either the White House or the House of Representatives
and clearly crosses traditional party lines. In the Senate, debate is now
likely to take place in late May, and we can expect to hear considerably more
testimony from the scientists who have actually proposed to carry out this sort
of research, including Dr. Michael West, CEO of Advanced Cell Technology in
Worcester, MA.

Curiously, Mr. Bush explained that he "wants
the NIH to fund much more work on Adult Stem-Cell Biology,"
something that does not have the same moral taint, and we here have no
objection to such funding and would certainly encourage it if we could.

Note: During the lecture, the President
coined the term "Research Cloning" to refer systematically to
what we and other scientists have consistently called "Therapeutic
Cloning" for more than a year now without a hint that he must have
known that he was deliberately changing "our" accepted jargon for his
own purposes. This curious turn-of-phrase will, no doubt, inject confusion into
the debate among those Senators who are undecided, but clearly this ploy served
his agenda of discrediting all forms of human cloning quite well.

As far as Congressional lobbying groups are
concerned, on the one hand we have

(1)The Coalition for the Advancement
of Medical Research, which represents patient advocacy groups,
such as

like The Alliance for Aging Researchin
Washington, D.C.; Daniel Perry, Executive Director and the newly-formed International Society of Stem Cell Research
with Drs. Leonard Zon of Children's Hospital in Boston, Irving Weissman of
Stanford University, and Douglas Melton of Harvard University; Dr. Zon says
"the Society will offer advice on clinical trials of new stem-cell
therapies and weigh in on hot topics such as human therapeutic cloning".
The Society plans to hold its first annual meeting late next year; while on the
other hand we have

(2) a newly-formed opposition
lobbying group called "Americans
to Ban Cloning," a patriotic-sounding consortium of groups seeking
a comprehensive, world-wide ban on all forms of cloning.

CNN followed the President's address with 15
minutes of additional commentary by Sen. Tom Daschel (D-SD), Dr. Panos Zavos,
Ph.D., an andrologist from Lexington, KY, and Prof. Alex Capron of USC in Los
Angeles, a former member of the President's Bioethics Advisory Commission
during the Clinton Administration.]

[Prof. Calib Finch, Director of USC's Alzheimer's
Disease Research Center, said that the work published in today's issue of Science
-- describing differential gene expression in the brains of humans vs. other
primates, like Chimps, Orangutans, and Rhesus macaques, by
teams at UC San Diego, GERMANY, and The Netherlands, including Drs. Ajit Varki
and Pascal Gagneux -- could tell us a great deal about longevity genes. We know
that the maximum lifespan for chimps is [55 - 60] years under ideal conditions
(such as are found in zoos) {but only [40 - 45] years in the wild} while the
maximum lifespan for humans is significantly more at 122 years (Madam
Jeanne-Louise Calment of FRANCE). Yet the genomes of the two species are 98.7
percent homologous. So what does this mean for the numbers of gerontic
genes? "If human aging is inherently slower than chimp aging,
it seems plausible that we may be able to discover some of the genes that
influence the species-aging phenotype, and these could become new targets for
intervention in disease," he said.

Finch believes that the ApoE gene could be
one of the candidate gerontic genes. It is associated with our more efficient
processing of meat compared with chimps, who eat more vegetable matter in their
diets. He speculates that perhaps there was a single mutation in ApoE that is
responsible for our ability to avoid the cardiovascular implications of high
blood cholesterol that is associated with substantial meat consumption that our
kindred primate species don't have. The same amount of meat fat that will not
affect humans can triple the cholesterol level in the blood of a chimp.]